Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [36]
“My mama used to cook this late at night,” she announced, blinking in the too-bright light. Daddy Glen was sitting in the living room in front of the television set with the sound turned down low, not looking at us and not speaking. I watched Reese’s eyes flicker toward him and then back to Mama and over to me. Daddy Glen’s hands kept moving on his thighs, the fingers working into knots, tightening on his trousers and then shaking against the dark fabric like the legs of dying june bugs turned belly up in the night. Mama pulled a tray of biscuits out of the oven and grinned at us.
“You got to get the tomatoes almost done before you put the eggs in, ‘cause you don’t cook the eggs much at all. Want them soft. Want them to melt like butter between your teeth and your tongue.” She spooned me out a scoop of eggs and put two biscuits on the plate next to the soft browned tomatoes. Reese spread butter on her biscuits and poured a big dollop of jelly next to her eggs. My stomach was so tight I didn’t see how I could eat, but Mama sat right across from me and smiled so wide I knew I had to eat it all. I did, slowly, while Daddy Glen sat silent in the next room and Mama went on talking like he wasn’t there at all. My eyes kept sliding over to where his hands gripped his thighs. I curled mine under the table, rubbed my leg muscles.
The biscuits stuffed me but didn’t satisfy. Once I started eating I could not get full. Reese seemed to feel the same way. She ate until her eyes looked swollen shut from too much food. Then she lay her face down on the table as if she were going to nap right there. Mama smiled at her and reached over to tuck her lank blond hair behind her ears where it couldn’t fall in her eyes. She buttered all the biscuits that were left and wrapped them in a towel to keep for morning. All the time she went on talking about nothing in particular, about her mama and meals she had watched her aunts cook up late at night, about a noise the Pontiac had started to make, and how she really needed to clean out the trap on the washing machine.
I listened to Mama with my mouth open. It felt like there was a wind blowing from my neck down to my belly, hot and chill at the same time, dropping little sparks into my nervous system. Finally Mama put Reese and me to bed together, sitting up beside us as if she were going to spend all night there. I could hear the television set still playing softly in the front room, and I tried to stay awake, but the food was like a drug in my system. I slid off into the dark and a dream of great soft strangling clouds lying like fogbanks on a field of blackberries. I woke up to Reese’s swollen frightened face and the low angry sound of Daddy Glen’s voice down the hall. I linked my fingers with Reese’s and prayed for silence, closing my eyes so tight my ears buzzed.
We had to move again that next week, but Mama said the new place would be better now that Daddy Glen was going to be working out at the Pepsi plant. But the new house wasn’t new. It looked just like the last three—small and close and damp-smelling no matter how many times Mama aired it out. It was just like all the houses Daddy Glen had found for us—tract houses with white slatted walls and tin-roofed carports. The lawns were dry, with coarse straggly grass and scattered patches of rocky ground. There were never any trees or bushes. Mama would sometimes put in flowers or spade up a patch in the back for vegetables that somehow never got planted before we would move again, but the houses always looked naked and abandoned.
“Unloved,” Temple, Aunt Alma’s oldest girl, told me while helping us unpack in the new bedroom. “Your daddy’s always finding you houses where it looks like nobody ever really wanted to live. This place looks like people just stopped in and left